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Khalil Deek: “He Couldn’t Get Arrested to Save His Life”

Al-Qaeda operative and suspected mole for Jordanian intelligence and the CIA

Khalil Deek is a naturalised US citizen and an extremist connected to both al-Qaeda and Hamas. There were a number of points in his career when he should have been investigated, arrested, or kept in custody, but the investigations inexplicably ended or even failed to get off the ground. For example, the FBI would normally be expected to take a dim view of a plan to blow up LAX, but Deek’s obvious participation in the Millennium Plot does not seem to have excited the authorities much.

Deek first came to the notice of US intelligence in the late 1980s along with Abu Zuabida, a fellow Palestinian who would go on to run militant training camps in Afghanistan. Between 1988 and 1996, Deek was apparently involved with the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), a US-based charity which the US government would later call a front for the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The IAP was closely tied to the Holy Land Foundation and Deek lived in Dallas, near the Foundation’s headquarters, in 1989. The Foundation was under investigation around this time, so perhaps this is the how Deek came to the authorities’ attention.